


Quiet Birds in Circled Flight

by ZoeBug



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (can it be domestic if they're on a road trip? sure), Brief Descriptions of Nightmare Gore/Violence, Brief horror, Closure, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Graffiti, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Light Grief/Mourning, M/M, Multi, Nightmares, Noah getting the love and remembrance he DESERVES, Polyamory, Post-The Raven King, Road Trips, The Raven King Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-19
Updated: 2016-08-19
Packaged: 2018-08-08 16:28:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7764913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZoeBug/pseuds/ZoeBug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"When you awaken in the morning's hush</em><br/><em>I am the swift uplifting rush</em><br/><em>Of quiet birds in circled flight.</em><br/><em>I am the soft stars that shine at night.</em><br/><em>Do not stand at my grave and cry;</em><br/><em>I am not there. I did not die."</em><br/> <br/>They begin to mark it everywhere they go. Onto muddy car windshields and grimy shop windows, dusty bookstore racks and library shelves, they chalk it onto sidewalks and graffiti the bathroom stalls at diners, they Sharpie it onto the bottom of “Welcome to X” signs.<br/><br/>REMEMBERED</p><p>(Along their roadtrip, Blue, Gansey, and Henry honor Noah's memory in the best way they know how.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quiet Birds in Circled Flight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bodtlings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bodtlings/gifts).



> For Dani, Noah, Kitty, Ciera, and everyone else in the twit crew who needed more Post-Raven King Noah appreciation. 
> 
> All I wanted was some closure so I WROTE my own closure ;;;A;;; #Noah Czerny Deserved Better 2K16-Forever. 
> 
> I am super duper weak for Sarchengsey, okay? So have some poly roadtrip with a giant helping of Noah appreciation/closure. Hopefully this can help patch up some of those Noah-shaped holes.

“ _Do not stand at my grave and weep_

_I am not there. I do not sleep._

_I am a thousand winds that blow._

_I am the diamond glints on snow._

_I am the sunlight on ripened grain._

_I am the gentle autumn rain._

_When you awaken in the morning's hush_

_I am the swift uplifting rush_

_Of quiet birds in circled flight._

_I am the soft stars that shine at night._

_Do not stand at my grave and cry;_

_I am not there. I did not die_.”

       - "Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep" by Mary Elizabeth Frye

 

* * *

  
The first time one of them does it, it’s barely just turned into Thursday.

The three of them find themselves sagging groggily into a booth at a squat little twenty-four hour diner at a small truck stop off the interstate. It’s still dark outside and the flood lights of the next door gas station’s overhang wash the color saturation from the parking lot pavement.

The diner is of the mom-and-pop variety with cracked vinyl seating and memorabilia of some seemingly randomly selected past decade plastered to the wall and a nearly omnipresent layer of grease.

Blue finds it unremarkable and common, Gansey finds it charming, and Henry would normally need some convincing to find it anything positive, but is easily steered into one side of the booth beside Gansey in his still half-asleep state.

Blue orders them three coffees (one with an extra shot of espresso for Henry) from the tried but friendly waitress with laughter line wrinkles around her eyes. Across the table, she watches Gansey snicker as Henry leans sideways and snuggles into his shoulder until Gansey starts running his fingers through his hair, devoid of product so early in the morning.

“He’s like a cat,” Blue remarks. She has one elbow propped on the tabletop and is resting her cheek in her palm. With her other arm, she’s building a tower out of the small plastic coffee creamer containers.

“Only when he’s sleepy.” Gansey laughs as Henry sighs into Gansey’s collar bone. “Wait until he fully wakes up. He’ll be horrified we let him out in public without his hair done.”

“I can hear you,” Henry slurs without opening his eyes.

Blue and Gansey share a skeptical glance across the table and laugh quietly.

“We love you,” Blue croons sweetly as the waitress arrives with their coffees.

To both Blue and Gansey’s relief she barely glances at Henry tucked sleepily into Gansey’s side before asking if they’re ready to order. They are and they do. The waitress departs and Gansey attempts to lean Henry upright enough to get some caffeine into him.

“I swear, if it’s the last thing I do,” Blue declares as she stirs creamer into her mug, “I will get you two to try grits before the end of this trip.”

“Good luck, doll face,” Henry murmurs sleepily at a packet of sugar substitute he’s attempting to pour into his coffee with only one eye actually open. Blue gently kicks his shin under the table. Gansey grins against the rim of his mug.

About three fourths of the way through her plate of eggs and bacon and grits, Blue chews around her smile while she watches Henry regain some of his  _Henry-ness_ with the aid of food and caffeine.

She watches Gansey pause to push his glasses further up his nose before launching into another point about the bias instilled in traditional Western historical documentation. Henry looks more adoring than interested, his eyesight trained on Gansey’s lips more so than his eyes.

Blue’s happy Gansey has started wearing his glasses during the day instead of contacts. He looks more like himself with the wire frames―more like Gansey the Scholar. Gansey, the boy with passion and exuberance and so much yearning for _something more_.

She’s happy that, even just for the duration of their trip where anonymity can give Gansey space to be _Gansey_ instead of _Richard Campbell III_ , he’s allowing himself the room to breathe.

Gansey, she thinks, deserves to not have to sequester the truest parts of himself to the small hours of the morning in the darkness and the quiet.

Across the table from her, Henry chances a quick glance around before swooping in and giving Gansey a quick peck on the lips mid-sentence. Blue snorts a few grits onto the tabletop at the startled look on Gansey’s face and promptly begins hacking at the feeling of a few of the grains flying into the _definitively_ wrong pipe.

“You’re an absolute heathen, Sargent,” Henry remarks, smiling. Blue swallows the mouthful of grits and coughs, thumping her fist hard against her sternum. Gansey eyes her worriedly from across the table and offers her a napkin.

“Dollar in the Offensive Terminology Jar, Cheng,” she croaks, eyes still watering from the small bits of grain that had assaulted her windpipe. She takes the napkin from Gansey.

“We have an Offensive Terminology Jar?” Gansey inquires. “When did this happen?”

Blue takes a large gulp of water before replying.

“Just now,” she says. Gansey raises and eyebrow and Henry laughs. “Honestly, for bisexuals in a polyamorous biracial relationship, you two make an astonishing amount of off-color jokes.”

“Pansexual,” Henry corrects lightly and takes another bite of pancake. Blue rolls her eyes and meets Gansey’s gaze from across the table. With a soft smile, he stretches one arm out across the tabletop, palm up. Blue places her hand wordlessly in his and he squeezes her fingers lightly.

It feels almost like another life, remembering a time when she wasn’t allowed to kiss Gansey, couldn’t kiss him for fear of fate snuffing out this fragile, beautiful boy across the booth from her. Her memory of kissing Gansey for the first time is crystallized, a moment suspended; his lips soft and warm and _hers_ beneath the rib-cracking despair of what finally kissing him had entailed.

She doesn’t remember kissing him for the first time _after_ quite as clearly. Mostly because it had immediately been followed by a second and a third and a fourth. Because it wasn’t nearly as earth shattering, because it was something Blue could _have_ without worry, without paying any price besides freely given love.

She remembers the first time she'd kissed Henry―how it was different than kissing Gansey, how Henry was a quicker kind of passion beneath her fingertips. She remembers Henry’s face after Gansey had kissed him for the first time as well, remembers thinking Henry had never looked so much like Gansey than with that astonished and elated expression. And she remembers thinking that Gansey had never looked so much like Henry than with the mischievous, excited way he’d laughed into the space between them.

And Blue thinks of her first kiss. Soft and safe and gentle like someone sighing. A little wet because of her crying and a little cold because of Noah being, well, dead.

Noah.

Of all the kisses in her life, most of them have only been possible because of Noah.

She thinks about her first kiss with Noah, thinks about the first time she’d kissed Gansey, about how he was only there to be kissed―to be loved and to love her back and, God, what a wondrous and miraculous thing―because of Noah.

She misses him. This reason she is _allowed_ to have these eightieth and two hundred and fourth kisses.

And with something thick stuck in her throat, she pulls her hand out of Gansey’s in order to stand up and lean across the table. She darts down to kiss Henry quick and gentle and sweet before pulling away just as fast. With the same swift gesture, she careens sideways to capture Gansey’s lips as well―just as quick and gentle and sweet―and hums contentedly as she pulls away.

Henry’s eyebrows are raised in amused surprise, as if he’s confused by the gesture but not at all in opposition to it. Gansey blinks owlishly behind his glasses.

“There.” Blue crosses her arms in approval and nods her head, still standing.

“There what?” Gansey asks, eyes still wide as he turns to Henry. Henry shrugs back at him with a smile.

“By proxy you have officially both kissed Noah," Blue declares and falls back down to the seat. Something bright and warm and slightly sharp around the edges flares in her chest.

Gansey blinks once, twice more, and then tips his head back into a laugh.

It’s a full bodied laugh the other two don’t get to hear often as Gansey usually opts for the quiet, universally palatable chuckle he’s groomed over the years, meant to lubricate silences and console the tellers of flat jokes. But this laugh is loud and bright and imperfect. It’s a little too sharp at the beginning and shows too many teeth and there’s a hint of a snort on one of Gansey’s inhales.

Blue and Henry are both enraptured.

Henry bites his lip in delight and looks to Blue and then back to Gansey whose shoulders he eventually hooks an arm around to pull toward him. Gansey is still laughing, eyes squinted with happiness, and the kiss Henry tries to give him keeps disintegrating when Gansey can’t manage to stop laughing long enough against Henry’s lips.

Blue beams into her coffee cup as she takes a sip and wonders if anyone has ever been as happy as she is in this moment.

 

Before they leave, Blue―as the smallest and most compact of the three―slips beneath the table and finds a spot unclaimed by years old discarded gum and scrawls REMEMBERED in neat, square letters.

By the time they’re thirty miles down the interstate, none of them can even remember the name of the diner. But they remember the joy and the kisses and the way Gansey looked when he’d laughed without holding back.

And they remember Noah.

 

* * *

 

It becomes a _thing_ , writing the word onto every surface imaginable, tracing it into the spaces they visit, onto the slivers of life they bare witness to together.

They leave the word behind them like a trail of breadcrumbs or the lines of a eulogy, a continuous fluttering ribbon stretching from Henrietta to everywhere.

They mark it onto muddy car windshields and grimy shop windows, dusty bookstore racks and library shelves, they chalk it onto sidewalks and graffiti the bathroom stalls at diners, they Sharpie it onto the bottom of “Welcome to X” signs.

REMEMBERED.

It is a beautiful and heartwrenching and bittersweet thing, the way Noah lingers between and around them. The way he always has but also not like that at all.

It matters so impossibly much and also doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. But then again that’s everything and everyone they’ve ever known and it’s so nearly perfect because of it.

 

* * *

 

Henry starts taking photos of all the places they write it.

Gansey insists they stop at a FedEx store every few days to print them off. He attempts to explain his preference for hard copies over digital concerning the new journal he’s started for their trip, but each time he tries Blue and Henry end up perpetually distracted.

At a FedEx store somewhere in South Carolina, they are thumbing through strange postcards and enthusiastically competing to find the most off-putting picture to send to Adam at school and Ronan back in Henrietta. Blue ends up winning with an image of a frying pan wearing sunglasses on a rocking chair with no explanatory caption or punch line.

Gansey pays for the prints and Blue for the postcards and Henry quietly sits in the back of the Pig for the next sixty miles and meticulously cuts the white edges off the pictures.

Gansey has to tear his gaze away from the rear-view mirror and look steadfastly out the windshield for a while to not show how touched he actually is. Even when Henry complains about Gansey’s “hipster inclinations” and insists posting them to a blog would be infinitely easier.

 

They stop at a gas station for fuel and snacks. Gansey writes the word onto the tile just below the sink in the men’s bathroom and Henry snaps a picture.

They rejoin Blue in the chip aisle and each kiss one of her cheeks and show her the picture and she kisses both of them back.

 

* * *

 

It’s a sweltering 94° as they cruise through the small, sparse downtown strip somewhere in Georgia. As was to be expected, the Camaro’s air conditioning unit was rattling loudly without making any significant contributions to reducing the temperature.

“Never let it be said Ronan doesn’t have an eye for detail,” Gansey drawls from the passenger’s seat. He’s fanning himself with some brochure that looks like it might be from someplace earlier in their trip as Blue is relatively sure the Southeast does not feature any glaciers of note.

“You’re the one who liked it like this,” Blue replies, following swiftly with a disgusted sigh. “It is too damn hot for this right now. We should stop somewhere. With _air conditioning_.”

“I wholeheartedly second this motion,” Henry calls from the backseat where he’s sprawled sideways with his feet up against one of the windows.

“Well, I’m glad you agree since, as passengers, your votes would automatically be overruled either way.” Blue smirks at Henry in the rear-view mirror.

“So much for your socialist values, Jane,” Gansey remarks.

Blue rolls her eyes and turns in to one of the parking lots.

“It _is_ socialist. They have air conditioning and we, as the less fortunates,” Blue pauses momentarily to correct her parking, “are going to go share in the wealth of not melting alive.”

She turns off the Camaro and the roaring dies away, allowing the loud whine of summer cicadas to bleed into the silence it leaves. As Blue climbs out of the car, Gansey lets his feet fall from the dashboard and squints in the bright sunlight to ascertain where Blue had brought them.

“Is this a-?”

“Henry!” Blue is knocking lightly on the backseat window by Henry’s head. “Yoo-hoo. Delicious gelato awaits those true of heart inside these very doors.”

Henry groans and sits up wearily, wiping sweat from his forehead. Blue backs up to give him room to climb out of the door as Gansey rounds the Camaro to join them. He looks sweaty and hot and his hair is drooping down into his eyes a bit with the heat and he looks immeasurably handsome and Blue kind of wants to smack him because of it.

“Alright, you’ve convinced me,” Henry sighs dramatically.

They order gelato in the blessed blasting AC inside the small gelato parlor from a cheery plump man with a thick, slow Southern drawl. Blue is smiling and happy and starting to remember what not being covered in sweat feels like. And it’s fantastic.

Which is why it’s strange to her at first when, after three bites of her chocolate gelato, she starts crying.

Gansey knows why. Henry doesn’t need to.

With a scraping of metal chair legs against linoleum, they are both at her sides with their arms around her shoulders and her face tucked into Henry’s chest. Blue is apologizing and Gansey is shushing her and Henry is sneaking bites of both of their abandoned gelato and placing his cold lips to Blue’s temple which makes her laugh and sniff thickly.

Gansey produces a packet of tissues from his pocket and Henry remarks how surprised he is that it’s not a monogrammed handkerchief and Gansey just pulls one out for himself before handing the rest of the pack to Blue.

Henry assures the large man behind the counter everything is fine and he seems to accept it as such. Blue is grateful.

For lots of things.

 

Before they leave, the man asks if he can take their picture for the large wall of Polaroids behind the counter depicting smiling families of customers and young teenage couples with spoonfuls of gelato. Henry immediately poses by himself and the man laughs and Gansey smirks, looking pleased.

They smile while he snaps the picture, Gansey and Henry on either side of tiny Blue, their arms linked behind her neck across her shoulders. She throws up a peace sign and winks.

Blue writes REMEMBERED across the strip of white border at the bottom of the Polaroid print. Gansey grabs the pen and adds “Gansey, Jane, and Henry - Summer 2016” below it in his small, neat handwriting

Blue steals the pen back once more to cross out “Jane” and write BLUE in all capitals above it along with a frowny face before handing it back to the man, who has to take a moment to stop laughing before he takes it from her.

He tacks it up behind the counter as the three of them return back into the stifling heat of the Georgia afternoon, ushered out by their own broad grins―young and beautifully themselves and so _immeasurably_ happy―beaming back at them from the picture.

 

* * *

 

It’s cold and raining outside the small run-down bed and breakfast in northern Montana.

Gansey’s watch lies abandoned on a dresser with his wallet so he’s not exactly sure what time it is. From his place in the worn armchair by the window, Gansey can see the cold blue glow of predawn beginning to light the sky.

It’s one of the small and lonely hours that exist in the early morning when the birds have yet to begin chirping and everything is still and quiet. There’s nothing besides the light sounds of Blue and Henry shifting every so often in the bed across the room and his own breathing.

Gansey draws one knee up and rests his chin atop it, surveying the fog collected on the window. It’s so cold this far north that it gathers into frost along the very edges of the sill. He wiggles his slightly numb toes and wishes he’d dragged a blanket over to the chair with him.

Usually falling asleep is the hard part. Once over that hurdle, Gansey’s insomnia nearly always unhooks its claws reluctantly from his temples for the night, content to return the next.

The first time he, Blue, and Henry had slept in a bed together, Gansey had fallen asleep to the soft sounds of their voices and hushed laughter, easy and effortless and most likely grinning like a loon. At least, that was the story the two of them had stuck to the next morning, Blue rooting around in Monmouth’s bathroom/kitchen/laundry for anything edible and Henry’s bed-head shooting immediately up the list of Gansey’s favorite things with one glance.

Most nights with Henry and Blue are easy. Not all, but most.

Staying asleep, however, is a different story.

The nightmares come often and without mercy, splashing terrible visions across the backs of his eyelids in dreams that linger after waking in cold sweat and shallow breaths.

Noah with eyes like the sockets of a skull, grinning wickedly to reveal a mouth full of razor-blades. Adam clawing out his own eyes with rusted nails where his fingers should be. Ronan thrashing in agony and horror on his back in the mud while Chainsaw rips her way out from inside his stomach. Blue with blood so dark it looks black dripping from her eyes like tears, bubbling and spilling over her lips that are mouthing broken pleas and his name as she chokes and shakes. Henry so still he trembles with the effort, eyes wide in horror as hornets swarm, crawling over his face, past his trembling lips-

Gansey squeezes his eyes shut, slides his index finger and thumb under his wire frames to rub along the bridge of his nose.

He breathes in. He breathes out.

He listens for the slow, steady breathing of Henry and Blue sleeping in the bed across the room.

He opens his eyes.

It is calm and quiet; the world here is nothing but a soft sigh.

From where it’s curled around his bent knee, Gansey extracts his right arm and lifts his fingertips to the frigid glass of the window. When he drags the pad of his finger down, a clean and clear streak follows in its wake. Beyond it, the pale light whispers of the approaching dawn.

His finger makes a few muted squeaks across the glass as he continues and he's just lowered his hand back to his lap when a soft, questioning sound makes him turn his head.

Eyes half open and hair looking as if she’d stuck her finger in an electrical socket, Blue is propped up on her elbow as best she can with Henry clutching her like a sloth would a branch and blinking sleepily over at him beside the window.

“Gansey?” she asks, her accent thick and voice rough from sleep. “You alright?”

Gansey feels the corners of his lips tugging upward. He sits up, uncurling himself from the pretzel he’d slumped into atop the armchair cushions. Gansey nods back at her.

“Everything’s fine.”

Blue frowns and then looks down to Henry, octopus-like, curled around her in his sleep. She snorts a little, then looks back up at Gansey.

“Come back to bed,” she huffs, to Gansey always sounding so much like a petulant (albeit, adorable) child on either end of sleep.

Gansey turns his head to glance toward the window. The pre-dawn glow outside is slowly brightening, shining through the thin lines of the word REMEMBERED that Gansey has drawn into the frosty fog.

He climbs off the armchair and crosses the room to the bed where it is still dark and soft and warm. Gansey places his wire frames on the nightstand and slides beneath the covers once more where Blue complains about his chilly feet and kisses him gently and Henry wakes up just barely enough to groggily demand he be included in any kisses happening before passing out again.

 

Gansey doesn’t fall back asleep again that morning, but it doesn’t really matter.

As they leave to turn in their keys at the front desk, Gansey can still see the streaked, ghostly image of his fingertips on the glass and the word he wrote there.

 

They’re barely on the road for an hour when Gansey passes out in the back seat listening to Blue and Henry bicker about the merits of glam rock.

 

* * *

 

Henry hadn’t really known Noah.

His memories of Noah are of fleeting noticing and from far away, a strange pale blonde boy talking around a table or walking along sometimes with Lynch and Parrish and Gansey in downtown Henrietta. At the distance Henry had always observed him from, Noah had perpetually resembled an upside down “J” of a boy, shoulders curved inwards and neck bent forwards.

Henry, having been yearning toward Gansey with such soulful intensity at the time, remembers wondering what kind of thing could be weighing on this boy’s shoulders that not even proximity to the handsome effervescent glow Gansey would cast onto those in his immediate radius could lift them straight.

Henry knows the answer now.

It’s strange, here in this impossible dream Camaro beside Blue and Gansey, to think about how many of his earlier questions were capable of being answered in the exact same way.

What does Gansey see when his eyes go wide and far away with fear? In those places where the other Aglionby boys are transparent in some ways and dense in others that are all the wrong ones, what has made Gansey gentle and thoughtful in the right moments and unyielding and stalwart in others just as perfect?

In a love like that he sees between Blue and Gansey, fragments of terror and grief linger in the way one can smell the gunpowder long after a shot has been fired. What happened there that Henry is still finding the shrapnel embedded between them?

Death.

How well his Blue and Gansey know Death. Henry is not a complete stranger to Death himself, had glimpsed it there in the dark and the claustrophobic squeeze of that hole like a shadow moving out of the corner of one’s eye, like the flicker of a familiar shape in low light.

But, then again, there were plenty of the more mysterious aspects of life with which Blue and Gansey were familiar and with which Henry was only peripherally acquainted.

Death. Magic. Evil.

Noah.

Henry hadn’t _known_ Noah.

But he does know that Gansey and Blue had loved Noah. Still love Noah. Miss him with the kind of grief that Henry sees rise and recede in them like the tide and with the tide’s same fearsome might.

Love was another thing he had only brushed his fingertips against before Gansey and before Blue.

Henry hadn’t known Noah enough to love him. Not in the real, direct way loving people is truly supposed to work. Not in the way Blue and Gansey have shown him it can be. Henry hadn’t known Noah enough to miss him in any way more substantial than that of a name recognized in an obituary.

But Gansey and Blue had loved Noah, and Henry loves Gansey and Blue so much that sometimes he can barely breathe with it. And he starts to recognize those long-cold bullet shells littering the ground between Gansey and Blue, starts to understand how Death can exist with and tear down and give forth Love.

And so Henry writes the word REMEMBERED onto the seats of benches. He traces the lines of the letters into the sand of beaches that he walks the lengths of with pant legs rolled up (further than normal) and each of his hands in one of Blue’s and Gansey’s.

And it’s a different kind of way than the other two, the way he comes to love Noah. Strange, even. Because Henry Cheng is not a man who does many things in life in a fashion one might describe as quiet or grateful, let alone both simultaneously.

But it is in this way, quietly and gratefully, that Henry comes to love Blue and Gansey’s Noah right along with them.

 

* * *

 

To say time is a circle is one of the strange concepts that are only entirely true when examining a small portion of the larger mechanism.

Time is most certainly a circle, but Noah’s time could be more accurately described as a loop. Time flows into it from before him and continues on after it, both directions stretching outwards without him existing in them.

Time is made up of circles and loops converging in on and flowing into one another, of loops made up of smaller loops, themselves all within larger loops. All times are the same time because they are all the same piece of twine, the same fragile material that can be folded and warped and twisted at the slightest provocation.

It was easy to see further along the small portion of curved string allotted to your life.

Or, afterlife as was the case for Noah Czerny.

Especially if one had been moving through time in circles, treading the same path over and over. All times were the same time even though Noah’s own personal loop of time was very small and very humble and the fabric of it frayed thin in certain spots.

But to see past your own loop, to peer off to the larger swelling curves of the universe’s workings high above you, to cast your gaze outward to strings you were not attached to, that was harder work.

One of the advantages, however, to walking a stretch of time more than once is that you become aware of exactly where to look and exactly what to look for to catch a glimpse of something more. You know what angles provide the most illumination, from what vantage points of the timeline you can see something more past the curving horizon, a piece of time that stretches beyond you.

Noah became very good at learning just how to crane his neck to see over the edges.

Sometimes the view was clear and sometimes it was less so, but every time he did so it was the same type of things he was allowed pieces of.

Flickers of a car windshield. The distant echo of a laugh. Hands clasped in hands. Footprints along beaches. The smell of coffee and eggs. And everywhere, _everywhere_ , he could see the word.

REMEMBERED. REMEMBERED. REMEMBERED.

He saw it scattered off into the distance wherever he looked.

REMEMBERED.

Black marker on white tile. Pen on glossy photo paper.

REMEMBERED.

Thin fingertips on fogged windows.

REMEMBERED.

Laughter and love and gratitude and _life_.

REMEMBERED.

Time bent itself inwards to brush across Noah’s palms and the line of his cheekbones for each place he was conjured, a drop of him sending ripples outwards across a still lake.

He mattered to someone. To _lots_ of someones. To beautiful and brilliant and brave and passionate and amazing someones. He mattered.

REMEMBERED. REMEMBERED. REMEMBERED.

He mattered. He mattered. He _mattered_.

REMEMBERED.

He mattered.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos always appreciated!  
>   
> [fanfic/podfic blog](http://zoe-bug.tumblr.com/) | [personal](http://xiexiecaptain.tumblr.com/) | [twitter](https://twitter.com/xiexiecaptain)


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